Too much of everything

terrible... so disappointed.

It’s sentimental, ridiculously long and only occasionally funny

Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

An utterly insane, yet amazing and important movie unlike anything else, except for movies made by Godard. This is arguably the peak of his career, and arguably easier, yet more difficult to watch. A mad day in a downfall of human kind, or at least modern society, where chaos rules, even in the film makers head. Some scenes are explicit, some are ridiculous with mad dialog, others are pure pornography, either for your thoughts, your eyes or for your live of classic cars or accidents.The film has some amazing bits which are both unlike anything you've seen or would believe, and some parts of the movie will annoy or even bore you, almost to death. It's a kind of dystopia downfall of human society, where it seems like the extraordinary thing are the ordinary.It's the most foul and awful weekend you could ever imagine, made with great visuals, annoyingly long scenes, hopeless cutting and amazing shots. It's political, and a very important anarchistic work, which explores both the film media, as well as the audience. Annoying sounds, extraordinary panoramic, oddly cut like in a society which have lost it's rules, and where all of nothing means something at the same time.It's in no way a perfect film. It's not supposed to be. It's supposed to make you feel something. It'll most likely be a love/hate relationship, where you have to decide what is to gain as a viewer.Most amazing scenes: 1) The opening scene with the sexual description. 2) The fighting scene with the bullying kid. 3) The amazing road accident queue with the following senseless driving. 4) The bloody animal scene... And there's more scenes hard to forget. Pick your own!Warning: Don't expect a coherent story or a meaningful point with all scenes. Enjoy if you like to see something different and wild mixed with strong visuals.

Week End is everything and nothing all in one film. It is a brutal work of agit-prop which treats its subjects with disdain- be they the apathetic and vile Parisian upper middle class or Godard's own Maoist youths. It is a perfect exercise in post-modern filmmaking- a film aware of its own power and uselessness. It is a film in love with and filled with an ethical hatred of cinema. A film where the fourth wall is meaningless and the viewer is the enemy. It is also one of the greatest works of cinema art.When viewing Week End, one must look at it as a film on to itself and also in the context of Godard's hyper-creative 1960s run.As a film on to itself, it bends the definitions of cinema as it follows the vile actions of an upper-middle class Parisian couple- a couple high on physical attractiveness with an ugly soul(less) to match. Around this couple is the decay of Western civilization through our avarice, racism, and misguided youth culture (and a healthy dose of car accidents). It is a powerfully political film without really having a specific political message. It is anti-capitalist without being pro-Marxist. It is anti-establishment without presenting an alternative establishment. It is the politics of hopelessness, disgust, and anarchy. It is what Godard saw out of his window in the ever faltering 1960s of youth movements matched with a heightened occurrence of genocide, racial oppression, and despair in the world. Hollywood gave us Easy Rider or Gimmie Shelter to visual display this despair. Godard gave the French Week End. It is the visual equivalent of throwing one's hands up in frustration.As a bookend to Godard's hyper-creative 1960s period, Week End's true brilliance shines. This is Godard's period which began with Breathless- a film in love with cinema and held together with radical, yet sensible, cinematic techniques. By time Godard's anger and frustration had over taken him (evolving through Masculin-Feminine, 2 or 3 Things..., and La Chinoise), Week End was the end result. While Breathless naively worshiped the beauty of cinema and youth culture, Week End is the "end of cinema". The beautiful femme fatale has been replaced with amoral cannibals (both figuratively and literally). Cinema techniques have become cinema tricks to torture the film's characters and audience.Week End is not a film for everyone. But those with the right eye for it will find an extension of art as an uncomfortable weapon- a film that dazzles and frustrates. And ultimately, Godard's most honest film in that it cleanly displays his sense of frustration with the culture he despises; the capitalist, Parisian upper-middle class; and the culture he one time adored; the Maoist youth culture of beauty and revolution.

Despite having a cleverly conceived and infamous 8 minute continuous take of the traffic jam from hell, I simply find this film nasty.There is no humour to lift the macabre hell and whilst it might have been dreamt up in a hallucinogenic haze, when this was fashionable, this doesn't relate to me. I get the slant on the misplaced morals in a modern society (a woman escaping from a burning car is only concerned for her designer handbag, not her passengers' well-being). It then just gets weirder and weirder, interspersed by shrill lunacy.As you can guess, I've never got into J L Godard. I love with passion almost all French, Italian and other world cinema, with Felinni and Bergman, both considered a bit balmy and self-centred, as favourites.It was only through esteemed Film Guides and other reviews that praised this film to the heights that I ever considered buying it. It's relative rarity and controversy are the only reasons to hang onto it.

I've thrown rocks at cops in protest rallies in my angsty youth, if nothing else at least I can understand anger and outrage as expression of political sentiment. I can also understand the folly of that violence. With a film like Week End, do we give Godard his satire or do we bemoan how blunt it is? Inasmuch as the film is an opportunity to express politics rather than a forum to discuss them, I'm willing it to give Godard the stage to see what he has to say. Is the vehicular havoc of the beginning "a scene of Parisian life", perhaps, Paris is notorious for its traffic jams, but the famous tracking shot that defines this part of the movie plays out like a tableaux of Tati humour, except there's no charm in its delicacy, the intended effect is horn-blaring cacophony. It gets the point across, this is a world of madness and hysteria we're tracking through.But what about the politics expressed here, once the amusing novelty wears off what happens inside this apocalyptic landscape of provincial roads littered with corpses and wrecked cars? A film doesn't need to resort to protest rally sloganeering to be agitprop, but when it does, when it quotes from Marx and Engels, when the US and Israel is the source of evil (curiously enough, France is not singled out among the imperialists), when the actual problems of Africa are trivialized in the manner of reading from a pamphlet, does that reveal a filmmaker who doesn't know any better or one that does but chooses to obfuscate the bigger picture to promote an ideology? I guess I'm wondering if the malice is naive or deliberate. If it was any other filmmaker I might begin to consider that the intended message is also an object of outrage and ricidule, but for someone who was a proclaimed Maoist, I can't help but shudder at the thought that he means what he says.Godard seems to me like he's the bourgeoisie of cinema, exactly what he despises. Having solved his apparent problems, he turns to the world to find a source of vexation to complain about. There's an insatiable hunger here to point out wrongs and shake fists in the air, nothing to love or embrace or attempt to understand. If he's not sneering at his own countrymen, he will speak on behalf of blacks or Arabs or he will make idiotic claims about modern music. His little reenactment of a revolution in the Parisian countryside is a mockery of that revolution.To paraphrase the words of one of his characters, likely there are more terrifying things to contemplate than the strange nature of man, but Godard can't even contemplate that strange nature. Likely he can understand it, he's an intelligent film mind and in the first few minutes seemingly without effort he creates a marvelous game of deceit, but he's too busy humiliating it, too busy trying to provoke a response to really evoke something. Fin du cinema, only for him maybe.